Child protection officials in Quebec mishandled reports of child abuse within the fringe Jewish sect Lev Tahor, a provincial report said.
In November 2013, about 250 Lev Tahor members fled the town of Ste-Agathe-des-Monts, north of Montreal, to avoid a hearing in youth court.
The group was facing allegations of child abuse and neglect from Quebec’s youth-protection department, including corporal punishment, underage marriage, sexual abuse of minors, squalid living conditions and the forced ingestion of drugs that pertained to some 130 minors.
The Lev Tahor community settled in Chatham-Kent, outside Toronto, and some families later fled to a small town in Guatemala.
The Quebec Human Rights Commission report, released Thursday, notes many failures in how the province’s child protection system handled the case.
Commission official Camil Picard said delays were “incomprehensible,” considering that it took 17 months for youth protection officials to seize the children after problems were first identified.
It also took school board officials 15 months to get proper schooling for the children in the community, The Montreal Gazette reported.
“Other considerations” than the well-being of the children were made priorities, commission president Jacques Fremont told a news conference. “Clearly, youth protection interventions regarding the children of this community did not fully respect the principle of the child’s best interests.”
The report also recommended better coordination between youth protection officials, the courts, and other authorities to act when children are threatened.
“This must not happen again,” Fremont said. “Our role is to provide Quebec with a wakeup call, and that’s what we’re doing. We dearly hope this will not happen again.”
0 thoughts on “Did Quebec Bungle Abuse Probe Into Hasidic Fringe Sect?”
The physical land base of Ste-Agathe and surroundings is part of the Laurentians — very lucrative winter skiing and recreation site, bought up in the middle of the 20th century mostly by Jewish realtors from Montreal — some suspected to have been connected with New York mafia (this is part of the premise of Mordecai Richler’s classic “The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz”). Today the “intrusion”of the Lubavitcher sect — entirely legally and above-board — upset some of these old established Montreal-based interests sufficiently powerful to shake the right trees in Quebec City and compel some kind of “investigation” that led nowhere (probably there was nothing criminal either suggested to be going on there or found to be going on there.)
The physical land base of Ste-Agathe and surroundings is part of the Laurentians — very lucrative winter skiing and recreation site, bought up in the middle of the 20th century mostly by Jewish realtors from Montreal — some suspected to have been connected with New York mafia (this is part of the premise of Mordecai Richler’s classic “The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz”). Today the “intrusion”of the Lubavitcher sect — entirely legally and above-board — upset some of these old established Montreal-based interests sufficiently powerful to shake the right trees in Quebec City and compel some kind of “investigation” that led nowhere (probably there was nothing criminal either suggested to be going on there or found to be going on there.)